Does the Roadmap towards a two-state solution for the Palestinians and the Israelis offer real hope, or is it a damp squib?

    The quartet, consisting of the U.S. the EU, Russia and the UN, devised it. The President of the most powerful nation on earth, the U.S., has seemingly adopted a hands-on approach toward facilitating its implementation, while the Palestinian leadership has unconditionally accepted its terms and conditions as drafted.

    Most of the Arab world approves of it and even the leader of the Occupier has voiced his approval (with 14 provisos). On June 25, Hamas, the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Islamic Jihad agreed to a three-month suspension of attacks against Israelis, and so, the Palestinians should be out celebrating shouldn’t they? Not exactly

    The Palestinians have heard it all before. They’ve had their hopes raised and dashed too many times. For a decade, their leaders have been negotiating settlements, signing accords, the most notable of all being the now defunct Oslo accords, brokered by former American President Bill Clinton.

Oslo’s demise

    Oslo reached its climax in January 2001 during discussions between the Israeli and Palestinian sides in the Egyptian coastal town of Taba, but they were abruptly brought to a close when Clinton’s term of office ended and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was voted out.

    In their stead, arrived pro-Israeli George W. Bush, who knew next to nothing about Mid-East politics, along with Bush’s “man of peace” Ariel Sharon, known to others as “the Butcher of Beirut” due to his involvement in the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.

    The breakdown of Oslo has evoked blame and counter-blame from all sides. Many in the Palestinian camp say that the last ditch negotiations at Taba had been progressing well and could have reached a successful outcome if only they had been given more time.

    Some Palestinian negotiators have claimed that Barak’s proposals were far from generous and would not have provided a viable Palestinian state, but merely a series of Bantustans dependent upon and subordinate to Israel.

    Former PNA Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat has said that Oslo failed primarily because of a document Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was asked to sign acknowledging that the site of the second Jewish temple was to be found under the foundations of Jerusalem’s Al-Haram Al-Sherif complex on which stands Al-Aqsa. This, Arafat wisely refused to do.

    Israelis accuse Arafat of not grasping the opportunity of peace while he had the chance. The Palestinian people blame the Israelis for electing the hard-line Likudist Sharon as their prime minister. Israel’s electorate counters that it chose Sharon as a response to the Palestinian Intifada, sparked by Ariel Sharon’s visit to Al-Haram Al-Sherif, accompanied by over 400 armed men, in September 2001.

    The months since the beginning of the Intifada have claimed almost 2,500 Palestinian lives and those of hundreds of Israelis, with many more maimed or wounded. Israel’s economy is at an all time low, while the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has to rely on handouts just to maintain infrastructure and pay its civil servants. The Tourism industry has been decimated throughout the region. There are no winners.

    Not through lack of effort, Oslo didn’t work, so should we pin our hopes on this latest plan for a two-state solution?

Obstacles on the path

    Even if we take George Bush’s U-turn from his stance of non-involvement at face value and give him the benefit of the doubt, there are several very real obstacles to the Roadmap.

    One of the main blocks is Sharon and his right-wing colleagues in Israel’s Likud Party. Sharon has never wanted a peaceful solution on the basis of land for peace. He was against Israel making peace with Egypt and Jordan and a vehement critic of Oslo. His answer to a peace plan proposed by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was to send his misnamed ‘defence’ forces into Jenin when 10 per cent of the refugee enclave was razed to the ground.

    Sharon believes that those Palestinian lands, called Judea and Samaria by Zionists, are part of Israel proper, although he did recently admit for the first time that Israel was in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a statement he later tried to retract.

    The Israeli Prime Minister has long been in support of Jewish settlements and despite his paying lip-service to the dismantling of some of them, it is doubtful that he possesses the political will to consign them to history. Even as a few barely inhabited Israeli outposts have been destroyed, many more have taken their place - one called Ariel, dedicated to Sharon himself.

    Others in the Israeli government, such as former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, now the Finance Minister, are even more hard line. In a recent op-ed, Netanyahu described the only kind of state he would offer the Palestinians: “The Palestinians would have internal security and police forces but not an army. They would be able to establish diplomatic relations with other countries but not to forge military pacts.

    “They could import good and merchandise but not weapons and armaments. Control over Palestinian daily life would be in the hands of the Palestinians alone, but security control over borders, ports and airspace would remain in Israel’s hands.” The idea of such a toothless state was supported by Ariel Sharon last year”, he added, “and by most Israelis”.

 PEACE STRAIGHT AHEAD

Half-hearted U.S. commitment

    Seriously problematic is the fact that the American President faces an election year during which he will need the goodwill of not only Jewish voters but also the backing of his main support base consisting of right-wing Christian evangelicals who view the unconditional support of Israel as part of their religious beliefs.

    Given that American aid and loan guarantees amounting to upwards of five billion U.S. dollars annually are essential to Israel’s survival, Bush could demand that Israel withdraws from Palestinian areas and dismantles illegal settlements. But the sternest demands without any real clout in the form of threatened sanctions, curtailing of aid or the severance of diplomatic links are mere empty rhetoric.

     If Bush were to wield a whip over Israel’s head, he would come up against opposition from Congress as well as the neo-Cons and Zionists in his own government. Doing so would put his head on the political chopping block and would require courage and commitment to do what is right against all odds. Does Bush possess this kind of self-sacrificial spirit? Highly doubtful!

    America’s pro-Israel bias is legendary and runs throughout U.S. government, media and society. Many Americans view Israel as being the only democracy in the Mid-East (an erroneous premise when 20 per cent of Israelis, Arab Israelis, are discriminated against) and believe that they share common values. Perhaps they do since both the U.S. and Israel are now unashamed occupying states.

    So, if Bush isn’t committed to his ‘vision’ of a Palestinian state or is unable to make the hard decisions necessary to see it through, then why did he get involved in the first place?

    The skeptical among us might say that his sudden interest in a Palestinian state was prompted by a wish to show the Arab world that America was on its side in order to quell the anger on the Arab street over the allied invasion of Iraq. Bush also wants the Arabs on board his ongoing ‘war on terror’.

     Others believe that Tony Blair, who genuinely does want to see peace in the Mid-East, used his, not insignificant, leverage to prod Bush in to making a public stand on the issue.

    Thus far, it looks as though the Palestinian leadership is the only body in the equation that is serious about a peaceful settlement based on an equitable two-state solution.

    The PNA has carried out the political reforms demanded of it and adopted Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) - someone with whom both the U.S. and Israel can do business - as the Palestinian Prime Minister.

    Both President Arafat and Abu Mazen have publicly denounced attacks on civilians and confirmed Israel’s right to exist.

    Yet, hardly was a first-time official meeting over between Sharon and Abu Mazen, before Israel began blaming the PNA for not stopping what it calls ‘the terror’ and began a campaign of targeted assassinations - in violation of Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention - mainly of Hamas senior figures.

State-approved terror

 
    If any side is experiencing ‘terror’ it is surely the Palestinians. What could be more terrifying than being surrounded by enemy tanks and armored personnel carriers, while Apache gun-ships and missile-laden F16s circle ominously overhead? What could be more disheartening than having to suffer curfews, roadblocks, land confiscations, and house demolitions?

    If we take away the promises and the positive speeches coming out of the White House and the Israeli Knesset, the reality looks bleaker than ever. The U.S. is busy trying to weaken Palestinian militant groups now that it has ousted one of their supporters, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

    At the same time the White House has put pressure on Syria to close the Damascus-based offices of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and is trying to erode both Syria and Iran’s support for the Lebanon-based group Hizbollah. America is also attempting to coerce the EU into blacklisting Hamas as an international terrorist group.

    More to the point, the U.S. and Israel are jointly exerting pressure on Abu Mazen to disarm all Palestinian groups which taken to its logical conclusion could evolve into civil war when, no doubt, Sharon would then say: the Palestinians can’t even get along among themselves so how do you expect us to sanction a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel?

    When and if peace talks begin, the Palestinian side will be negotiating from a standpoint of weakness. This has long been the plan. Once they are entirely on their own and in a state of internal disarray, it is thought that they will accept any crumbs Israel feels like throwing their way.

    Such thinking is simply wrong. The Palestinians have proved themselves to be tenacious and single-minded when it comes to obtaining their rights. They have struggled for over half-a-century and the least they will accept is a contiguous state with Jerusalem as its capital and a right of return for Palestinian refugees exiled throughout the Arab world. Neither the contentious issue of Jerusalem nor the right of return is tackled in the ‘Roadmap’. These both proved to be Oslo stumbling blocks.

    In the final analysis, both parties to the conflict have shown themselves incapable of negotiating peace bi-laterally, while the U.S. is hardly an honest broker. In this case, other world powers should take center stage alongside the U.S. on behalf of the Palestinians.

    As anyone who has taken a course in First Aid knows, the initial step must be to control the bleeding. An international peacekeeping force should be dispatched to the region to prevent further killing, a move the Palestinians have long been calling for. This would pull the rug from under the Israeli side’s pretext for its occupation, ‘combating terror’. Once both parties are able to enjoy a period of safety and security, cooler heads will, no doubt, prevail.

    Without a strong interlocutor, such as the EU or Russia working parallel to the U.S. on behalf of the Palestinians, the Palestinian leadership should be careful what it signs up to. Only negotiations between two sides of equal power can bear fruit for both. A people, living under occupation armed with only guns, facing a nuclear-armed bully is like a featherweight boxer taking on the heavyweight champion of the world. It’s time for the international community to do what it did in the former Yugoslavia and intervene for the sake of justice, humanity and world peace.

What is the Roadmap?

    There are various phases and conditions outlined in the Roadmap, which is not a blueprint for peace, rather a guide.

*   The first phase demands that “visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere” are to be made by the Palestinian National Authority. This will involve the “restructured/retrained Palestinian security forces” cooperating with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and U.S. security officials.

*  Once Washington is assured that the PNA has complied with the first      demand, the IDF will begin ‘progressive withdrawal’ from the areas occupied by it after September 28, 2000 and Israel must freeze all settlement activity.

*  The second phase relates to “the option of creating an independent Palestinian state’ with ‘provisional borders’ and ‘attributes of sovereignty’ determined by the ‘consensus judgment of the Quartet”.

*  The third phase is vague and talks about negotiations to settle outstanding issues, including the Palestinian right of return, borders and the final status of Jerusalem.

*  All is conditional upon a “comprehensive Middle East peace” which means that if the Syrians or the Lebanese are perceived as being hostile to Israel, the Palestinians don’t get their state.

Note: The full text of the ‘Roadmap’ can be found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2989783.stm

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